


A Leave-Taking

by Camellia Cook (thekurosakiconundrum)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gallifreyan culture, Gen, Leaving Home, Minor Original Character(s), Time Lords are Awful, absolutely scathing commentary on gallifreyan culture courtesy of the Doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 21:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15104822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekurosakiconundrum/pseuds/Camellia%20Cook
Summary: You don't bundle up your young family member and run away in the middle of the night just for fun. That's just not how it works. The Doctor admitted in Heaven Sent that he left Gallifrey because he was scared--but what if it wasn't himself he was scared for?





	A Leave-Taking

The Time Lords considered themselves so terribly enlightened, so far removed from their barbaric ancestors, who had watched criminals and primitives torn apart for sport. The Time Lords stood for peace, for harmony, and for order, a bastion of civilization against the forces of darkness, chaos, and the seething mass of sentient life that populated the universe. Those lower creatures, unable to control their instincts, noisy and dirty, always fighting, dying, loving, breeding, running about—it was all so terribly undignified. The Time Lords had progressed far beyond any of that.

The upper classes on more primitive worlds might be given to cruelty, just as the Time Lords had in days past. But their society had evolved, and now the deference that the Time Lords demanded was only their due, since they were the ones who had made Gallifrey an unrivaled power in the universe and they were the ones who still steered her course today.

They were, simply put, the most advanced society in every way. Not just in their technology, but in their culture as well, in the way they interacted with each other. Violent crime was almost unheard of in the Citadel. After all, in other places, murders were most often committed for love, hate, or money, and the Time Lords had long since elevated themselves far past such petty concerns. To become a Time Lord, one had to devote oneself entirely to the life of the mind. There was no room for the baser impulses, when one’s mind was full of the secrets of the universe.

It was all horseshit, of course. The capacity of his people for self-delusion never failed to impress and amaze the Doctor. The Time Lords could be as base and cruel as anyone else—crueler, even, for their lack of awareness. Since they thought themselves incorruptible, they never bothered to notice their own vices. The Games of Rassilon were long over, but sadism was alive and well on Gallifrey. It ran like a vein of poison through all their petty bureaucratic power struggles. And where there was no malice, there was a callousness, a high-handed arrogance and a presumption of right that was every bit as dangerous.

Worse, these two vices fed on each other. All these lofty Lords of Time, puffed up on their own power, treating their inferiors like garbage and lacking even the self-awareness to realize that they got off on it. It was simply the natural order of things, and it didn’t bear questioning. The Time Lords hadn’t evolved past aggression, tribalism, and territoriality, they hadn’t left their desire to display their dominance in the past. This fact was obvious to anyone who stopped to think about it, since genetic drift had been strictly kept in check since the Time of Rassilon. They had merely repressed it, so of course it would come bubbling up.

Other societies—ones clever enough to realize that their people weren’t perfect—had release valves for their aggression, for their instincts. Carnivals and sports, the harmless violence of holographic games and films, elaborately escapist food cultures, even certain ritualized sexual practices. Time Lords, on the other hand, had no need of such devices. They had no steam in them to let off. This was patently absurd, the Doctor knew. He wondered why everyone else seemed so convinced. He’d thought for the longest time that it was just him who felt this strange, roiling discontent. That there was some particular flaw in him, perhaps. There wasn’t—it was simply that most Time Lords wouldn’t admit that they were anything else but the perfectly enlightened scholars they pretended to be.

Not everyone was fooled, not quite. There was a whole group of people who knew Gallifrey’s enlightened state for the pack of lies it was: the children. The Time Lords liked to pretend that children—those messy, wild creatures—didn’t exist. They continued their family lines, of course, but they paid commoners to look after the children until they were old enough to send to the Academy.

If a child was in trouble, he was expected to solve his problems himself. No parent would intervene, and no caretaker would be able to do anything. So, the children of the Time Lords took care of things the best way the knew how—by learning to fight back against the bullies, which often led to becoming bullies themselves, or by learning how to take it, to accept taunts and blows alike. This was were they first began to learn hardness, to learn cruelty. (The Doctor hadn’t learned either of those things, though he had learned about pain, and he had learned about fear, and he had learned about rage.)

That was when they were with other children. When they were with adults, they were expected to act like junior Time Lords, to comport themselves with dignity and not to speak unless spoken to, which was difficult for any young child. Punishment for failing in this expectation was swift and decisive, though rarely corporeal. Every child knew, though, that a cutting word from Father could be worse than any blow. The withholding of already scant-affection and attention cut at a vulnerable child’s mind just as a switch would cut at their body. Mind-numbingly tedious mathematical tasks were also a popular form of punishment—it was supposed to be good for the child’s intellectual development, but being forced to sit and do pages upon pages of pointless sums for hours at a time with no breaks was nothing more than a form of torture, in the Doctor’s estimation.

The whole system, from birth to the Academy, was designed to break the child’s will. To teach them to accept the abuse that came from anyone higher on the pecking order than they, and to cope by passing it down to anyone below them. It wasn’t a flawless system, of course—there were children who slipped through the cracks, who somehow escaped the conditioning. But then, those children—children like the boy the Doctor had been once—could never truly function as members of Gallifreyan society. Most didn’t even make it through the Academy, and those few who did were forever on the periphery, tolerated but not trusted, known as eccentrics and treated with suspicion by the proper Time Lords.

There was even a measure of self-correction in the system, so that even if such eccentrics managed to reproduce, their ability to be critical wouldn’t be passed down to their young. The Time Lord class was small enough and closed enough that everyone knew each other, and the child of an eccentric would be forced by other children to become the pettiest, most pedantic, most stultifyingly boring and surreptitiously cruel (to put it simply, the Time-Lord-iest) just to get by. In the Academy, they would have to constantly prove to their teaches that they weren’t like their unruly ancestors by making sure never to give an answer that was even remotely creative or deviating from expected behavior at all.

This was exactly how the Doctor’s son had become such an awful piece of work. He had tried, tried to teach him kindness and compassion and decency. Had tried to teach him that there was more to life than fitting in, and that he ought to be proud of thinking differently from his peers.

It hadn’t worked. He’d gone away to the Academy, and he’d come home on Spring vacation a year later a different boy. He’d become like the lads the Doctor had despised during his own school days, a minor-league bully who received comments on his work praising him for his diligence and organization—code words for memorization and lack of original thought. The Doctor’s love for his son and his contempt for the kind of person his boy was becoming warred inside him, and he admitted that perhaps he hadn’t handled it as well as he could have. Though, in retrospect, he didn’t think anything he could have done would have made a lick of difference.

Keivan was a minor presidential functionary, now—in the Doctor’s experience, bureaucrats were the very worst sort of Time Lord. They exemplified all the things the Doctor hated about his people. They were small-minded, xenophobic, utterly boring and tiresome, and enjoyed what little power they had far, far too much. Keivan was an especially nasty specimen—he worked in the department that managed the affairs on non-Time Lord Gallifreyans, and from the way he spoke, with such thinly-veiled contempt, he clearly considered them—his _own people_ —a lower order of life.

This was regrettable, and brought the Doctor great sadness. But it wasn’t what had brought him to this crossroads. It wasn’t what had him contemplating breaking all his promises, and abandoning all his responsibilities.

All save one, that was. He would not abandon Susunaparnelofor. Susan, he called her. His grand-daughter.

Susan was special. Her awful father and distant, self-involved mother didn’t realize how special she was, how she needed to be treated with extra care. She was such a kind girl, genuinely good in a way that so rarely survived childhood on Gallifrey. She had so many talents, was so amazing in so many ways, but they weren’t ways that the Time Lords could understand or appreciate.

She suffered at the hands of her parents and teachers. The Doctor had seen the reports her teachers sent home—at the Academy, they thought her dull, thought her unworthy of the mantle she intended to someday take up. Her parents, especially her father, interpreted this as shirking and disobedience. He was cruel to her whenever she came home, treating her like a servant, ‘to show her what she would amount to.’ He had never once told her he loved her, so far as the Doctor knew. He had never held her when she cried, nor even held her at all. Her mother was no better, and in some ways she was worse—he’d once seen her slap Susan for ruining dinner by crying at the table.

It made the Doctor sick that his own flesh and blood could be so careless with his daughter’s wellbeing, so deliberately cruel. It made him even sicker that he could do nothing to stop it. He’d tried, but his word held no weight with Keivan. His son had despised him for a long time now, tolerating him only out of a sense of familial duty. In Keivan’s mind this was only fair, the Doctor was sure. After all, having a political radical and a known social critic (let alone someone who’d been involved in what passed for a salacious scandal on Gallifrey, even if this was before Keivan was born) for a father hadn’t been easy for him.

Something had to be done. Susan was in pain, and it was only getting worse. Somehow, no one could see this but him. It amazed him that people could be so blind, but on the other hand, it wasn’t really surprising no one was looking. Gallifreyans were all touch-telepaths and touch-empaths to one degree or another, but Time Lords almost never touched, even among family—which was enough in itself to do serious harm to an empath as gifted as Susan.

The Doctor had seen this at once, of course, and touched her as much as he could, holding her when she was small, taking her hand whenever they spoke. But he couldn’t help her much when she was at school, and even when she was home, he had to restrain the impulse to take her into his arms and keep her there—the last thing she needed was to be ordered away from him because her mother suspected some sort of impropriety. He didn’t think she had anyone else who would sit with her and just be, allowing her to feel their affection for her.

It wasn’t nearly enough. She was starved for love, the poor girl, and it wasn’t healthy for her to have him as her only source—strong psychics had a tendency towards codependence, and he didn’t like encouraging that. She needed to be somewhere where she could be surrounded by people that cared for her, whole loads of them. A big, happy family, that was what Susan needed. People who would hug her, kiss her cheeks, pat her casually on the shoulder. She deserved a feast of emotions, deserved to know and be known by others in the way only an empath of her caliber could.

She could never have that on Gallifrey. She would either waste away from lack of psychic contact, or she would learn to shut that part of herself down, the way… Well, never mind him. It wasn’t likely that Susan would end up like him, anyway. She was strong-willed, in her way, but she wasn’t on that level. She wouldn’t be able to mutilate her own mind for the sake of her ambitions, especially seeing as she didn’t really have any.

Despite that, she would never drop out of the Academy and become a Shobogan or some a member of the other lower social orders. Nor would she join one of Gallifrey’s mystical sects, who actually valued people like her. That would be too embarrassing for her family, to whom she was far too loyal, given their treatment of her. Susan would become a Time Lord or die trying, and the Doctor very much feared it would be the latter. Academy suicides were not uncommon, after all.

She had to leave. She had to get off-world. There was simply nothing else for it, and there was no one else to make it happen but him.

He wouldn’t miss Gallifrey. There was nothing for him here, not anymore, not really. Susan was the only family he really had, and while he did have friends, had compatriots in his lost-cause of a campaign for reform, they would get on fine without him. The only friend he would truly regret leaving hadn’t spoken to him in years, and surely no longer held him to a his childhood promise that the two of them would regenerate together when the time came, as it soon would for both of them. Perhaps they could patch things up in the future, when they were both different people.

Gallifrey certainly wouldn’t miss him, either, and it wouldn’t miss Susan. He could tell her that this was a grand adventure, and that he could have her back before she was missed. She was as curious as he’d ever been about the outside universe, so she’d go, and during their travels, he was certain that she’d find some place she liked better than here, that she’d meet someone worth staying for.

The Doctor rose from his desk, crumpling his many drafts of goodbye letters into a ball and tossing them into the fireplace. It was better to leave without a word—it seemed cleaner, somehow. He, Susan, and an unused TARDIS would simply disappear.

They would vanish into the night, and leave Gallifrey and its myriad mundane cruelties behind them.


End file.
